


turned dreams

by mornen



Category: The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Blood, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Character Study, Choking, Connection To Nature, Despair, Drinking, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Nosebleed, Post-War, Reflection, Scars, Self-Reflection, Silmarils, Strangling, The Silmarillion References, Violence, War, Water, choking on blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27134183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: ‘You never forget wounds,’ his father told him in an early autumn, when he was playing with wooden swords still. ‘But there are some you don’t speak about.’And that was the end of questions then, the end of questions of what it was like in the before times when the world was only dark and Oropher was lost for five years in the shadows. But he learned what they meant when his world was torn away from him, his home destroyed once and then twice and then drowned, no hope of return.He doesn’t talk about it either.*Thranduil reflects on his past and his own desires as old scars bothers him.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	turned dreams

Thranduil’s playing soft with the water like it could never hurt him, fingers beneath the surface growing longer with the way the current pulls them or a trick of refraction. He pulls his fingers out clean, and the river takes away his blood.

Blood spills down his throat. His nose is bleeding again, and the blood comes up sudden, from throat to mouth, and the taste of it is lost beneath the desperation of trying to breathe in lungfuls of blood. He chokes. The river takes that blood too when he coughs it out into the sun-touched water.

He puts his hand to his face, feeling the blood dripping down from his nose, running now down from his mouth. He catches it with both hands, even though he’s choking again. But somehow he’s still thinking of his clothes, and the blood that’s ruined sheets and shirts and dresses, staining the fabric, sometimes forever.

He spits out more blood into the river, washes his hands again, leans out over the river and watches drops of blood drip from his face in perfect red, disappearing without trace the instant they touch the water. At least in standing water you would see the blood spin out, if only for a moment.

His skin is almost see-through, green veins lining his arms. The pain is an instant there and then an instant gone. Again he washes his hands and then presses his nose closed and waits.

‘You never forget wounds,’ his father told him in an early autumn, when he was playing with wooden swords still and had only tasted his own blood. ‘But there are some you don’t speak about.’

And that was the end of questions then, the end of questions of what it was like in the before times when the world was only dark and Oropher was lost for five years in the shadows. But he learned what they meant when his world was torn away from him, his home destroyed once and then twice and then drowned, no hope of return.

He doesn’t talk about it either. The fire and the wire to his neck, cutting through skin, cutting off air, choking to death in the middle of a battle, caught by a garrote. And then an axe to the head of the dwarf strangling him, a dead dwarf’s weapon seized by a dying elf, and fuck, he can still feel the wire around his neck.

He coughs up more blood and maybe he’s going to faint this time. He lies on the moss by the river. Sometimes, if he’s had enough wine, he can talk about the first time: The battle with the dwarves where he got a white scar about his neck, almost completely encircling it, a necklace he can never remove.

The wind starts up again, and he watches the golden of the leaves. It is autumn again, when he thought that maybe summer would last a little longer this time, even if it never does.

But he misses the warmth that Melian could bring and the gardens that bloomed forever, never fading, all a show of her home, the home she fled to once his home was destroyed (the first time).

He could laugh about it. He could laugh, but then he will bleed again, and the blood is still warm in his mouth, growing cold against his lips. He can see himself in his mind, what he must look like, lying in warm gold on the green moss, golden hair spread out, pale skin becoming more translucent as the winter grows and the sunlight disappears, lips stained red with his own blood. And it can be beautiful, this fucking despair. He can ruin himself just a bit longer, because in some world, in some place, in some time, in some words it will be beautiful.

And maybe that’s fucked up, but people have lived and died for beauty, and it aches in a hard way deep inside of him, like an organ rotted inside his body that he cannot cut out. And maybe he shouldn’t gather silver and white gems, as many as he can find, as many as he dares to find, and keep them locked away beneath the earth, beneath the deep reaching roots, but there’s a part of him that needs to, because maybe then he could make it all mean something.

Because even if he can talk a little of the first time if he’s drunk enough that the words spill out like the blood that seeps now down his neck, even then, he cannot talk of the second time, when it was elves that came with swords and torches and a despair in their eyes that he could never twist, even with his most beautiful poetry, into something beautiful. Because it was despair beyond beauty, nothing left but a driving terror, an ache deeper than anything he can imagine, like they had been emptied out, hollowed, scraped of everything inside of them – heart and lungs and blood – all taken out with a scalpel and a silver spoon, and then the bodies sewn back together, not quite right, but well enough to get by, filled now only with despair and horror and an unyielding need.

Fear beyond comprehension.

He can’t find words for it even if he wanted to, and he doesn’t, because there are some wounds you don’t talk about, even if you never do forget.

He doesn’t want to think of it either, so he cuts off the thoughts in his mind and focuses instead on how the sun is glinting in his hair, lighting it, the translucency of it, the way his son brushes it and whispers that it’s more beautiful than any gold in the world. How maybe that is true, for Legolas, but no one will ever die for his hair, but they might die for his beauty if he gets down on his knees and begs, but even then, it’s a gamble.

With the Silmaril it was never a gamble. The Fëanorians would always come, with their swords and their despair. And everything was lost, and then lost again.

Someday he thinks, maybe he will find it, if he keeps looking: The Silmaril cast into the sea, the Silmaril cast into the earth. One could wash on the shore, the other could have been encased in stone when the fire of the earth finally died and the magma grew cold. There is little hope, but still, one could be found. He does not know what he would do if he found one besides take it and hold it and ask the question that you do not ask because if the answer is not the one you think it should be, then everything was for nothing.

It is an answer he should not look for, even if maybe he could finally have the answer if held a Silmaril in his very own hands. It is a question he should not ask because the answer could break him. He will never find what he wants.

Still he wonders: was it worth it? As his blood drips from his fingers, as his blood runs down his tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> the only thing I thought when writing this was what the fuck am I writing


End file.
